


safe

by warlockholmesx (hungryghost)



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Dungeons & Dragons - All Media Types, Original Work
Genre: Based on a Dungeons & Dragons Game, Eventual Smut, Exes, Exes with Feelings, F/F, If I Don't Write It Who Will, Introspection, Lesbian Sex, Oral Sex, Pining, Porn with Feelings, Secrets, Sex while injured
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:00:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24422410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hungryghost/pseuds/warlockholmesx
Summary: When Charm bumps into her old friend—okay, ex-girlfriend—Magpie again, she realizes two things. First: she doesn't give a shit about the adventurers Magpie's been traveling with; and second: she can't help missing Magpie.----A short fic about a grumpy halfling barbarian and the quiet wizard she’s not sure she ever fell out of love with. Based on my D&D campaign.
Relationships: Original D&D Character(s)/Original D&D Character(s), Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	safe

**Author's Note:**

> Magpie and her girlfriend Charm were thieves working their way up Westruun’s underworld—until two years ago, when Charm disappeared in the middle of the night, and Magpie abandoned her initiation into a thieves’ guild to learn magic. 
> 
> Now Magpie is a wizard on a mission in Turstfield when she bumps into Charm again, who’s taken the name Amara and is a member of the Shield, Westruun’s armed paramilitary force. They rekindle their friendship, but Charm doesn’t care for Magpie’s adventuring party. Not until they don’t return to town one day.
> 
> I often write about this ship from Magpie’s point of view, so I thought I’d try writing this fic from Charm’s. It’s mostly introspective, but there are feelings, and angst, and some smut at the very end.
> 
> [This D&D campaign is set in Matt Mercer's homebrew setting of Exandria.]

When Magpie’s voice cracks into her consciousness late one night, Charm nearly breaks her arm all over again. It’s been four days since she last heard from Magpie—four days since she found the Turstfield stables ablaze and Magpie and her party straight-up disappeared from town while chasing a Ravager gnoll who had tried to target the village elder Naxsaz. 

“I trust them,” the gnoll Enax had said to Charm when she confronted him about it, spluttering about how, just twelve hours ago, her commanding officer, Major Kildrim Thorn, had specifically told her friend’s adventuring party not to leave under _any_ circumstances. “Don’t you?” 

What kind of stupid question was that? It didn’t matter if Charm trusted the party or not—she didn’t, for the record—but orders were orders, and she knew that Kildrim wanted Magpie and her friends under the Shield’s supervision.

Looking for help, Charm had exhaled sharply and turned towards Captain Gabranth, only to watch the tired-looking human man rub his stubbled chin thoughtfully and say, “Their hearts are in the right place. We’ll explain it to the major.”

Easier said than done, of fucking course, because just a couple of hours later, she’d heard Kildrim’s voice in her head: “Charm, we need you here in the Dawnmist Pines. Come _now_.”

And Charm _had_. She had taken a horse, galloped off into the Dawnmist Pines to assist him and the Shield officers with him, and nearly seen Kildrim die. Probably come close to death herself. And all she could think was “What’s the point of _all this_ if I can’t even protect the people I care about?”

What’s the point.

\----

Charm survives the battle with demons at the Dawnmist Pines, but even with a healer with them, she leaves with a broken arm and a nasty black eye. (Kildrim breaks two ribs, and she’s glad she didn’t have that, at least; breathing is hard enough as it is with Magpie around, and she doesn’t think broken ribs would make things any easier.)

The next morning, after they’ve had a few hours of sleep, they begin the slow trudge back to Turstfield.

Then they walk through the gates and Kildrim asks where the party is, and Enax says they haven’t returned, and for a moment, Charm’s blood runs cold.

Charm doesn’t like Magpie’s new friends, she _doesn’t_ , but. They should be back by now, shouldn’t they? Unless something went terribly, terribly wrong?

\----

The party doesn’t come back that day. Charm’s sure; she passes by the north gates more than a few times, until a human guard named Michael—just like Magpie’s _new_ best friend, grumblegrumble—kindly says he’ll call her himself when they return.

Charm thinks she might’ve missed something, so later that night, she makes her way to Humblebrew’s, clambers—with difficulty—unto a high stool, and asks Malachai Humblebrew himself if the party has come back, perhaps through another gate or portal or whatever the fuck it is wizards use to sneak into places.

But infuriatingly, all the large, red-skinned tiefling does is give a majestic shrug of his shoulders and say, “You should know, shouldn’t you, Lieutenant Amara?” 

As if being an officer of the Shield would make Charm all-knowing. As if the people in this godforsaken town would volunteer information to her; she and her dragonborn mentor are not Captain Gabranth and Lieutenant Val, people the townsfolk trust, but newly arrived outsiders who haven’t made an effort to know them at all.

But as consolation, the tavern owner offers her some whiskey.

As the halfling nurses a glass of amber liquid, her chest warm, breathing slow, a part of her wants to ask to see Magpie’s room. Maybe there are answers nestled in desk drawers or tucked between her sheets.

But Charm knows the answer before she can even ask. Humblebrew values discretion, and Lieutenant Amara is nothing to Magpie. Charm means something, but she isn’t Charm anymore.

\----

When Magpie‘s voice comes into her head later that night, Charm sits up in bed and hisses at the pain of jostling her arm, but there it is.

Until she heard Magpie’s voice, she didn’t realize how much she missed it. A voice that sounds brusque among her party, but that is unexpectedly soft now—tentative, almost. Quiet and only for her.

“Hey, Charm, it’s me,” Magpie says, and Charm imagines the dark-haired girl in the middle of nowhere, the pines pressing close behind her as she weaves her magic. Charm can see the curve of her jaw, her short brown hair, her green eyes aglow in the firelight, somewhere distant and unreachable.

Magpie presses on, “Long story, a lot’s happened, but we’re on our way back there. How’s the town? Are you safe?”

And Charm wants to laugh aloud.

“Oh, Kildrim is gonna _kill_ you,” she wants to say.

She could say, sharp as hell, “The town’s safe, no thanks to you.”

Or, laying on the guilt: “I nearly fucking died, and you weren’t here.”

Or even, simply: “You had _one job_ , Magpie.”

But instead, tumbling out of Charm’s mouth, harsh but more honest than anything she’s said in years, is: “You better fucking get home safe or I’ll find you and kill you.” 

Then, she mumbles, almost as an afterthought: “Town’s fine.“ 

And bites her fucking tongue.

Charm hates how hot her cheeks feel when she lies back down, and waits for Magpie to say something, anything back. 

(Magpie doesn't.)

In the back of her mind, Charm knows that she’ll regret keeping her broken arm a secret from Magpie—but that’s a problem for tomorrow, or the day after that, or whenever the hell the party returns.

But she doesn’t realize that she said “home”, as if this stupid backwater town were anything like Westruun, not until the next night—

— _after the party trudges back into town, dusty and dirty but alive; after Magpie sees Charm’s arm in a sling and doesn’t_ care _that she’s_ Amara _now, just casts a spell, and suddenly Magpie’s voice is in her head, low and urgent and worried: “You told me you were_ safe _.”; after Kildrim reveals that she and Charm have been handpicked for something bigger than they know, and Magpie rounds on Charm and asks why she never looked for her in the two years they were apart, and it takes everything in Charm not to blurt out everything she’s kept a secret for so long when Magpie’s looking at her like that_ —

—when Magpie slips into Charm’s room in the Shield headquarters and quietly shuts the window behind her. 

There’s no need for words now that Magpie’s fears have been laid bare for all of them to see; words won’t be enough for her, not for a long time. And there’s a moment when neither of them breathes: Magpie raw, and tired, and hurting as she stands by the window, Charm rising unsteadily from the bed.

But then Charm moves to lock the door, and turns back to see Magpie meeting her halfway, winding her quick hands into Charm’s braided red hair, and kissing her for the first time in _two goddamn years_.

Magpie is careful, always careful. She carefully undresses Charm between slow, searching kisses, sighing when Charm returns them with a little more force, a little more heat, murmuring, “Careful, your arm—”

But Charm is stubborn, and needy, and Magpie’s always liked that, and soon, Magpie is pressing Charm down onto the bed, taking in the sight of the halfling's lightning scars, the tattoo of the winged serpent twisting down her right arm, the play of light on her muscled stomach. A glimpse of Magpie’s green-eyed gaze, gentle and intense all at once, is the last thing Charm sees before Magpie reaches out to flick off the bedside lamp.  
  
“Missed you,” Magpie whispers into Charm’s mouth in the near-darkness, “I missed you so much,” and Charm smiles, then lets out a soft moan as Magpie dips her head and kisses down the column of her throat.

Charm’s body has no secrets from Magpie, and the wizard knows it, _savors_ it as she drifts further down Charm’s body. She takes her time—tracing Charm’s freckles with delicate fingers, swirling her tongue around each nipple, leaving a trail of hot, bruising kisses down the space between her breasts, meeting Charm's gaze all the while. 

It’s all pleasure, and agony, and Magpie drags it out so long that Charm is just about to complain when she feels, rather than hears, Magpie chuckle, so, _so_ close to where Charm is hot and wet for her. She presses one kiss to Charm’s slick inner thigh, then another, closer still. And then she slowly, slowly leans in, and smiles, and licks a long wet stripe up Charm’s cunt.

Charm arches into Magpie’s mouth, hissing, “Fuck, _fuck_ ,” and she feels Magpie grin, and hum, and graze Charm’s clit with her teeth, and there isn’t much talk for some time. 

And when they finally come together, after Magpie’s wrung two bone-melting orgasms out of her and come, trembling, around Charm’s skilled, uninjured hand, Charm realizes, not for the first time, that home isn’t a place.

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes you just want to write tender smut of your OTP, I guess.
> 
> There are campaign-canon things in this fic: the party leaving town to chase after the Ravager gnoll who’d threatened the town elder; Charm and Kildrim going out into the Dawnmist Pines and getting injured in battle; the message Magpie sent via Sending; and the message Charm sent in reply.
> 
> But for the most part, I wrote this fic to explore what I think Charm felt while the party was off chasing gnolls; what Magpie wished she could have done the night they returned; and how much Charm would have wanted it, too.
> 
> If you're curious about these characters' latest shenanigans, come say hi on Twitter at @warlockholmesx!
> 
> This fic was completed on May 14, 2019. Revised on May 28, 2020.


End file.
